A. RARE EVENT OCCURRED ON ELECTION DAY last year. Arizonans and Californians rejected a key part of Washington' s drug war: the ban preventing doctors from recommending to patients potentially helpful drugs like marijuana.

On November 5, nearly two out of three voters in Arizona supported Proposition 200 and 56 percent of California's voters passed Proposition 215. Both initiatives allow doctors to recommend marijuana for serious illnesses, including relieving nausea caused by cancer chemotherapy, stimulating appetite for those with AIDS wasting syndrome, correcting a certain type of glaucoma that can cause blindness, and pain relief. California's Prop. 215 is limited to marijuana, but Arizona's Prop. 200 allowed a doctor to recommend any Schedule I drug (e.g., marijuana, heroin, LSD) as long as (1) there is scientific research supporting the recommendation, and (2) a second doctor concurs. Prop. 200 also reformed parts of the criminal justice system and provided resources for drug education.

But, it is important to note, that both initiatives require the doctor to make his or her identity known so that he or she can be called upon to defend the recommendation in court. Because the drugs covered by these initiatives remain illegal under federal law, doctors risk their licenses and their livelihood when recommending these drugs.

Therefore, I do not believe that doctors have an incentive to recommend marijuana frivolously simply because they have something to lose — unlike the other marijuana distributors out there today.

Popular reversals in the drug war do not happen often, so prominent drug warriors quickly concluded that the voters in those states were tricked — by well-financed campaigns with slick TV ads — into supporting an otherwise unpopular policy idea: drug legalization. The White House drug policy director, former General Barry McCaffrey, referred to the initiatives as "stalking horses for legalization."

Yet there is a big difference between these initiatives, which are medicalization approaches, and legalization. The main difference is the order of magnitude. These initiatives will affect perhaps a few thousand patients, whereas legalization would make drugs available to tens of millions of adults in a regulated market, like alcohol. That distinction, however, did not prevent pundits from smearing the initiatives as something they are not.

Following the election, New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal described a legalization conspiracy in a November 15 column titled "While America Slept." Rosenthal predicted that drug policy reformers "will quickly make a mockery of the national consensus against drugs through the technique of heavily financed state-by-state creeping legalization." Rosenthal directed his ire at one campaign donor in particular, investment advisor and philanthropist George Soros, who donated nearly a million of his personal dollars to the state initiatives.

Although Soros is on the record saying that he opposes full legalization but supports an open debate, Rosenthal's label stuck with both conservatives and liberals. Former Bush administration drug czar William Bennett called Soros the "sugardaddy to the drug legalization movement"; former Carter cabinet official Joseph Califano called Soros "the Daddy Warbucks of drug legalization."

The similarity of Bennett's and Califano's characterizations is telling. Neither political party has contributed anything like unique thinking to drug policy in decades. Bennett and Califano personify the atrophied discussion on drug policy in this country, and, as a result, voters are frustrated with the one-dimensional approach.

Despite allegations of a conspiracy, the truth is that these initiatives began in each state. No one donor or national reform organization masterminded these campaigns. Furthermore, the propositions did not pass because of "deceptive" advertising. According to polling data, voters strongly supported the ideas in the initiatives before they were filed. Claims of hoodwinking California's voters are even more farfetched because the state legislature twice passed its own medical marijuana laws only to have them vetoed by Governor Pete Wilson (R).
If anything can explain the successful passage of the propositions it is common sense — an understanding that doctors and patients, not the police, are the best judges of which drugs to use in treatment.

The history of the U.S. drug war with its McCarthy-like tactics also played a role last November 5. The time was right for change. Voters are tired of the drug war's futility and know that its policies have exhausted every repressive means at hand to stop drugs, while failing miserably to deliver a drug control policy. History had moved us to the point where the democratic process was bound to create change.

After organizers in both Arizona and California approached us at the Drug Policy Foundation and others in the reform field, we were able to offer some assistance — both intellectual and financial. The Drug Policy Foundation shared research and experience on medicalization strategies as well as funding (about $328,000).

We reformers and our donors did not fool the voters. Rather, we harnessed history, and it was our greatest accomplishment.

At the same time, I view the major donors who openly gave money as heroes of American democracy. They could have told us they supported us and then kept their money in the bank or in the surging stock market. George Soros, George Zimmer, Peter Lewis, John Sperling, Richard Dennis, Laurance Rockefeller— to name only a prominentfew — took risks that they would be defamed, as they were. Yet, they stuck to their guns.

To those who believe that the way to kill off the drug policy reform movement is to scare off big donors, think again. The more likely result is that drug policy reformers will become even more political. We have confidence that we will be even more effective in the future. We also know that some career politicians who have counted on drug-war hysteria will soon be seeking honest employment.

No amount of money or advertising can turn unpopular ideas into winnable initiatives. The opposition to the Arizona and California propositions, although not as well financed as the "Yes" campaigns, was boosted by the free media attention given to its high-level representatives: top Clinton administration officials, Republican candidate Bob Dole, three former presidents, and a former surgeon general. Even Califano's Manhattan-based Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse drummed up attention with a slanted survey of California voters right before the election.

The propositions touched a sensitive nerve in the drug war: Why are police and Washington bureaucrats dictating what doctors can and cannot recommend? Bennett demanded in the December 9 Weekly Standard that the Drug
Enforcement Administration, which has been responsible for scheduling drugs for over 20 years, should not wait for state medical boards to discipline doctors but should act "unilaterally against the small number of pro-pot physicians who are likely to recommend marijuana for their patients."

Why is a "small-government" conservative inciting the federal police to nullify the voters' wishes without at least first seeing the results? As long as doctors and patients understand the costs and likely health risks of what they do, there is no emergency requiring federal police action.

So far, the Clinton administration has been reluctant to say that it will aggressively prosecute doctors, but that threat is the first part of its official response to the propositions. The administration stresses that it will look for doctors who abuse their powers, but its message is being interpreted for what it is: a scare tactic. Already doctors are reporting that they are now more reluctant to use the propositions because of the intense federal scrutiny.

The Clinton administration says it is waiting for more research to be done on marijuana, but this promise is a smoke screen. Ever since Congress created the drug scheduling system and tentatively placed marijuana in Schedule I in 1970, the federal government has routinely ignored any recommendation to change marijuana's legal status. In 1972, Nixon refused to receive the findings of the congressionally mandated commission that recommended decriminalizing marijuana. In 1989, the DEA's administrator overruled his chief administrative law judge who held that marijuana should be moved to Schedule II, where cocaine and amphetamine reside.

More recently, the Clinton administration decided to keep closed a federal program that, between 1976 and 1991, provided marijuana on a prescription basis to a handful of patients who were approved by the federal government, including the DEA. Now, out of the hundreds of people who applied, only eight patients remain in the federal government's prescription marijuana program.

It is a bit disturbing, and not a little deceptive, to see the Clinton administration declare itself on the side of "science, not ideology" when it allows the police to determine which drugs can be prescribed and which can be banned from medicine. Since Congress looks to the Justice Department to approve medicines, the result over the past 27 years, unsurprisingly, has been precious little research that would upset marijuana's perch in Schedule I.

Is there any question that the federal government has politicized research into illegal drugs? And, why do hardline drug warriors emphasize the message children will get from a reform, like medical marijuana, regardless of the research? A 1996 survey by Califano's think tank shows that teenagers rate marijuana as much more easy to buy than beer. What kind of message is that?

Now that Props. 200 and 215 have passed, the prospects for better research have brightened, but only a little. Americans must protest the government's deceptive war on doctors and patients as these initiatives have done. •

This article appeared in the March 1997 issue and is reprinted with permission from The World & I, a publication of The Washington Times Corp., copyright 1997.